Meet Roger Canals

Anthropologist and filmmaker, Roger Canals is a Full Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona. A specialist in visual anthropology, he has extensively studied the role of images and visualities in Afro-American religions, namely in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Spain.

Canals has published numerous articles on these topics in journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, Hau, Ethnos, and Visual Studies. He is the author of several books, including A Goddess in Motion: Visual Creativity in the Cult of María Lionza (Berghahn Books, 2017), The Image that Never Ends: A Journey through Visual Anthropology (Berghahn Books, 2025), and Visual Trust (editor, forthcoming). As a filmmaker, he has directed several internationally award-winning films, including The Many Faces of a Venezuelan Goddess (2007), A Goddess in Motion (2016), Chasing Shadows (2019), and A Matter of Facts (2025, with Mihai Andrei Leaha). Canals received the Fejos Fellowship for Ethnographic Film in 2016 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Canals is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of the ERC Consolidator Grant "Visual Trust: Reliability, accountability, and forgery in scientific, religious, and social images" (2021–2027). He will be in residence at the University of Chicago during the autumn quarter of 2026 as a Lichtstern Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He holds a PhD from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris and the University of Barcelona.